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Disgusted! Taken a trip to emergency care to...

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"Disgusted! Taken a trip to emergency care to..."

About: Belvedere Medical Centre

After being unwell for nearly a week my son filled out an e consultation form because it was two weeks before a GP was available. A Dr did call the next day and told him if symptoms persist they would see him in surgery, 3 days later I called to say his symptoms had worsened but only another phone call consultation happened with the advice of paracetamol. Another week later he went in to the surgery to ask to see a Dr where he was told the next appointment is available in 9 days so he went to urgent care to be told he had glandular fever but had to check it wasn’t scarlet fever. How is any of this acceptable? This surgery has gone downhill in the last couple of years they have taken on more patients, GPs and nurse practitioners made the building bigger yet have less appointments available. The new e consultation is a joke it takes ages to fill in and has questions that can be quite hard to answer in writing when you just want to talk to a Dr! If you have the app you might be lucky to nab an appointment if you keep checking but not for a nurse or late nights, for a late night you could be waiting even longer. I have called the surgery to speak to the surgery manager who wasn’t available (fair enough) the receptionist said they would get her to call me and I’m still waiting. The receptionists (some are friendly) don’t seem to all know what’s going on either and have either given us the wrong information or no information at all on 3 occasions. This used to be a great surgery but not any more.

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Responses

Response from Belvedere Medical Centre 4 years ago
Belvedere Medical Centre

Submitted on 22/08/2019 at 18:25
Published on nhs.uk at 19:06

We do apologise for your recent experience with BMC

We have attempted to search using the information given above regarding your son.

We have searched for all eConsults submitted with subsequent visit to Urgent care but have not been able to ascertain any patients that match this criteria.

We would be grateful if you could call the surgery or write to the Practice Manager to make yourself known to us so that we can investigate this further.

The eConsultation system has been extensively trialled and approved by the NHS as the most appropriate tool to direct patient to the correct service in relation to their condition or query submitted.

If a patient is unable to submit an eConsult they can call the practice where the reception staff will take details of what is required, a Physician Associate will call the patient back the same day if the query is submitted to the surgery before 13:00 or the next working day if submitted after 13:00.

We have indeed extended our premises to meet the demands an increased patient list size and have recruited more staff as a result.

Most members of clinical staff have appointments available on-line – we do not allow Practice Nurse or Health care Assistant booking on-line as they have different times allowed for the various different types of appointments they conduct.

Our appointment system is updated every week allowing appointments to be released for the following 2 weeks.

The Practice Manager has no outstanding telephone calls to return, again if you make yourself known to us, she will call you within the next working day

We apologise for your experience regarding reception staff, we have taken on a number of new reception staff to meet the demand as a consequence there has been on-going training.

We will raise this with members of reception staff to ensure all have received the same training

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